Food Geographies                                                                                           Robbie Faselt

Op-Ed                                                                                                             10/29/14

 

Servers and the Ebb and Flow of Restaurant Business

The restaurant server is one of the most popular jobs in the country and according to the National Restaurant Association, currently, 1 in 12 Americans work in the restaurant industry and about 50 percent of all adults have worked in the industry at some point during their lives. The industry is clearly very large with over 13 billion workers, but overall, workers in the industry do not get paid very well. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the average annual salary for a server is just over $20,000. In fact, servers are twice as likely to use food stamps as the rest of the U.S. workforce and three times as likely to be living in poverty.

The main reason for this is the existence of the tipped minimum wage, which since 1991 has stayed set at $2.13 per hour. Not many people even realize that the tipped minimum wage exists, but according to the DOL, servers in 43 states get paid less than the regular minimum wage hourly based on the assumption that the rest of their wages will come from customer tips. In fact, 22 states pay their tipped workers less than $3 per hour.

Although tips can often lead to servers making well over regular minimum wage per hour, overall, tips are very inconsistent and are completely dependent on restaurant customers. Not only does the customer decide how much to tip based on his/her enjoyment of the dining experience, but also servers need busy restaurants in order to make good money.

There is an ebb and flow to the restaurant business both daily and on a seasonal basis. The average restaurant is open for lunch and dinner and that means that there are two blocks of time a day in which restaurants are filled with customers. From about 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM, many customers come in for lunch and from 5:30 PM to about 8:00 PM, there is a dinner rush. During these periods, servers receive many tips due to the large volume of customers. But during the period between the lunch and dinner rushes and the period after the dinner rush, generally, restaurants receive a lot fewer customers, which is something I can attest to having worked in a restaurant this past summer. During these down periods, servers are not acquiring many tips, which means they do not have much to supplement their hourly wage.

In addition, restaurant business is very dependent on the time of the year. While these seasonal fluctuations may not affect restaurants in major cities to a great extent, restaurants located in towns in touristy regions have a tourist season, in which restaurants are usually busy, but during the rest of the year, business declines. In terms of server wages at these restaurants, they are much higher during the tourist season, but servers often struggle to makes ends meet during the longer offseason.

From a personal experience of working in a restaurant located in a touristy town, I found these fluctuations in business to be a reality. I worked in a restaurant in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which gets very busy in the summer due to a renowned theater festival. During the summer, the restaurant was completely filled almost every night of the week and all of the servers made well over regular minimum wage. But after the theater festival ends every summer, sales decrease and servers receive fewer tips due to the decline in customers. I did not work past the summer tourist season, but I learned from some of my coworkers who work as servers year-round that during the offseason, they make just over minimum wage and many of them take on other jobs just so that they can afford rent.

Also, there are certain days throughout the year that are generally very slow business days nationwide. According to Blue Sky Local, a company that tracks restaurant sales, 61 percent of restaurants report a decline in sales during a holiday or major event. A report by the National Employment Law Project gives examples of servers who worked on Super Bowl Sunday that made a total of $10 in tips in a day.

Servers deserve to be paid more, but due to the ebb and flow of the restaurant business both daily and on a seasonal basis and servers’ reliance on tips to make a living, they do not make much money during “down periods” in business. One way to ameliorate this would be for new legislation that states that employers must pay their employees the regular state minimum wage rather than the tipped minimum wage during these “down periods.” These “down periods” should be defined as the period between the lunch and dinner rushes and the period after the dinner rush, as well as during the tourist offseason when restaurants report decreased sales. By enacting this legislation, servers would not be so reliant on tips, would be more financially secure, and would have some income that they could rely on during “down periods” in business.

 

I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.

Robbie Faselt

 

Works Cited

The Aspen Institute. Reinventing Low Wage Work: The Restaurant Workforce in the United States. Rep. The Aspen Institute, 2012. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://www.aspenwsi.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/The-Restaurant-Workforce-in-the-United-States.pdf>.

Bittman, Mark. “A Valentine for Restaurant Workers.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 13 Feb. 2014. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/opinion/bittman-a-valentine-for-restaurant-workers.html?_r=0>.

Blue Sky Local. Why Your Restaurant Is Losing $30,000 a Year & You Don’t Know It. Rep. Blue Sky Local, 2012. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://www.blueskylocal.com/restaurant-research/SSR%20Insights%20-%20Bluesky%20Local%20-%20October%202009.pdf>.

Kilhefner, Johnny. “The Average Yearly Income for Fine Dining Servers.” Work. The Houston Chronicle, 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://work.chron.com/average-yearly-income-fine-dining-servers-20195.html>.

Myotte, Maria. “Op-Ed: Restaurant Servers Can’t Live on $2.13 an Hour.” Yahoo! News. Yahoo!, 11 Dec. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-restaurant-servers-39-t-live-2-010524712.html>.

National Restaurant Association. 2013 Restaurant Industry Pocket Factbook. Rep. National Restaurant Association, 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://www.restaurant.org/Downloads/PDFs/News-Research/Factbook2013_LetterSize.pdf>.

Nayak, Rajesh, and Paul Sonn. Restoring the Minimum Wage for America’s Tipped Workers. Rep. National Employment Law Project, 2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://nelp.3cdn.net/f6df4ed353601d4c50_x6m6iy650.pdf>.

U.S. Department of Labor. Minimum Wages for Tipped Employees. Rep. U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division, Dec. 2011. Web. 30 Oct. 2014. <http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped2012.htm>.

 

Food Geographies                                                                                           Robbie Faselt

Dinner Rush Response                                                                                   10/14/14

 

Bob Giraldi’s 2000 film, Dinner Rush, not only depicts an entertaining story that takes place in a single setting over the course of single night, but it also does a great job of portraying work and workers in a restaurant. The film clearly depicts an intense, busy workplace with a variation of different interactions between restaurant employees that shows these employees acting in their own interest. These interactions take place not only between just the “back of the house” or just the “front of the house,” but also across the two main spaces that make up Gigino’s. These interactions are the result of each employee seeing the space that is Gigino’s in a different way, but mostly as a place that needs to be taken advantage of for personal gain.

One interaction that displays the head chef’s motives is when Chef Udo tells a line cook to go home because he is not chopping vegetables correctly and has a dull knife. The main reason why he does this is because as Fine points out, “[The cooks’] doings determine others’ judgments of his or her competence (Fine, 90).” Udo sends the line cook home because he does not want the cook’s poor chopping ability to be representative of the food that he is sending out to the customers, who know that Udo is the head chef.

Another instance of an interaction between employees that shows the cutthroat nature of the atmosphere of Gigino’s is when one of the servers takes a plate of food out of another server’s hand so that she can use it for one of her tables. Although, in theory, restaurants are a place where “collaboration is essential,” there is also competition between servers due to the fact that the majority of a server’s income comes from tips (Fine, 87). According to Fine, “…the customer controls the server through the power of the tip,” which is why the server in the film who stole a plate of food from another server is inclined to act in this way.

Another major interaction that occurs between employees at Gigino’s is the interaction between owner and head chef, father and son. Throughout the film, Louis is seen asking his son, Udo, to make the menu include more wholesome, old-fashioned Italian food. Udo wants to create more creative dishes in the nouvelle cuisine form and is seen asking his father to stay out of the kitchen and to let him have control over the food. Louis never exerts his power over Udo and instead gets his old-fashioned Italian food from Duncan, one of the sous chefs, who makes him special dishes. Even though Louis is acting selfishly in this instance, trying to get his son to change the menu, he never enforces his power, which goes against Prole’s stereotype of an owner in Abolish Restaurants, which states that owners have to make sure that “employees have to be constantly coerced, monitored, and played off against one another (Prole, 32).”

Each of the employees at Gigino’s sees the restaurant in a different way. Chef Udo sees it as a place where people will eat his food and pass judgment on it, the servers see it as a place where they need to work as hard as they can in order to be tipped nicely, and Louis sees it as the owner, making sure everything runs smoothly, while at the same time trying to improve it by attempting to change the menu. The fact that these employees of the same exact space can see it in different ways is explained by Doreen Massey’s idea that space is a sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicities.

 

I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.

Robbie Faselt

Works Cited

Fine (2009) Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work.

 

Giraldi, B. (Director). (2000). Dinner Rush. USA: New Line Home Entertainment.

 

Prole (2010) Abolish Restaurants: Worker’s Critique of Food Service Industry.